Some of America’s September 11, 2001 losses were self-inflicted injuries

On September 11, 2001, America suffered a series of terrible losses.

We mourn nearly 3,000 people who died in the attacks and also honor the almost 500 officers from 10 different law enforcement or public safety agencies in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia who died because there were men and women who sacrificed their lives to protect others that day.

The attacks caused billions of dollars in damage but our greatest financial cost was incurred because they provoked the unsuccessful invasion of Afghanistan and provided cover for the lies that took American military forces to Iraq. The U.S. federal price tag for these post-9/11 wars is over $8 trillion.

In the wake of the attacks, President George W. Bush called for a global ‘War on Terror,’ but he instead launched an ongoing, international, American-led military campaign to inflict terror on anyone that resembled Sunni pan-Islamist militants, Salafi jihadists, or poor people with dark-skin.

In the 3,520 days from September 11, 2001, until members of US Seal Team Six killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda, on May 2, 2011, the cause of justice was wildly perverted by madmen in the Bush administration.

Over 940,000 people have died in the post-9/11 wars due to direct military violence. An estimated 3.8 million people died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to about 4.7 million.

The killing of American citizens by US military drone strikes is prohibited by the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, which states that no person shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

The right to due process is one of the most important protections in the Constitution. It ensures that the government cannot take away our rights without following fair procedures. This is also a principle of international law, enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that everyone is entitled to “due process of law.”

Among the ten US citizens killed in separate drone strikes were a 16-year-old boy and an 8-year-old girl who were not known members of al-Qaeda or any other terrorist group. The Americans slaughtered by their own country were Anwar al-Awlaki, Samir Khan, Hassan Ghul, Jude Kenan Mohammed, Ahmed Farouq, Abdul Kareem Qurban, Kamal Derwish, 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, and 8-year-old Nawar al-Awlaki.

The overthrow of the Taliban regime, which had harbored al-Qaeda, was temporary. President Donald Trump sent Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in February 2020, to surrender in a deal that sold our allies in Afghanistan.

Trump agreed to get out of Afghanistan by the end of April 2021, but the United States Armed Forces did not complete their withdrawal until August 30, 2021, amid a chaotic situation for which President Biden faced severe criticism after 13 U.S. military members were killed in Kabul.

It took nine rounds of talks over 18 months. At one point, Trump secretly invited the Taliban to the presidential retreat at Camp David on the eve of the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks but he shut that down after an American service member was killed.

While the Taliban agreed to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a haven for terrorists and to stop attacking U.S. service members, Trump released 5,000 Taliban prisoners without any enforcement mechanism to force the Taliban to keep its word and the deal didn’t require that the Taliban stop its attacks against Afghan security forces.

“Trump had no real sense of what was at stake in the war or why to stay,” writes Georgetown professor Paul Miller in a digestible history of the 20-year war. “Trump all but assured the future course of events would reflect the Taliban’s interests far more than the United States.”

H.R. McMaster, Trump’s second national security adviser, has called it “a surrender agreement with the Taliban.”

“The Doha agreement was a very weak agreement, and the U.S. should have gained more concessions from the Taliban,” said Lisa Curtis, an Afghanistan expert who was the National Security Council’s senior director for South and Central Asia during the Trump administration.

Under the harsh Taliban rule women’s rights have suffered a crackdown, basic services are neglected, and Afghanistan’s economy has floundered. Malnutrition has soared, and hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost. Most women have been banned from working.

Afghanistan is a safe haven for terrorists as indicated by the discovery of Ayman al-Zawahiri in the nation’s capital, Kabul, where the al-Qaeda leader was killed by a U.S. drone strike in July 2022.

Since the American invasion in the wake of 9/11, 3,500 U.S. and allied troops have been killed, tens of thousands of Afghans have lost their lives, and the U.S. has spent $2 trillion.

Polls suggest most Americans tend to consider the war a failure.

The United States not only failed in achieving its goals in Afghanistan, but it incurred the wrath of billions of people around the world.

“Signing this agreement with Taliban is an unacceptable risk to America’s civilian population,” wrote former national security adviser John Bolton at the time. “This is an Obama-style deal. Legitimizing Taliban sends the wrong signal to ISIS and al Qaeda terrorists, and to America’s enemies generally.”

The 9/11 attacks caused more American law enforcement agent fatalities than any other single incident in our country’s history, among them many whose slow, painful, lingering deaths were indirect results of exposure to poison after the assault.

From 2018 to 2020, the United States government undertook what it labeled “counterterrorism” activities in 85 countries.

According to a 2018 study by the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, President George W. Bush’s “Global War on Terror” caused at least 800,000 deaths, including civilians, combatants, and those who died from indirect causes such as disease and famine. The study found that the war displaced millions of people and caused trillions of dollars in economic damage.

“After the attacks, we urged the government to respond with fairness and justice, transparency and accountability, and commitment to fundamental human rights,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “Instead, to our national shame, political leaders’ fear launched forever wars, torture, indefinite detention, and other horrific abuses.”

“Today, the government continues to discriminate against Muslim, Black, and Brown people, scapegoating entire communities under the guise of ‘national security.’ We are deeply dismayed to see the same fear-based playbook used against Asian communities in the U.S. and people who dissent against the government,” said Shamsi. “The country we want and need must ground security for everyone in human rights and civil liberties, equality, dignity, and accountability. No exceptions.”

America’s record of shame is not limited to foreign wars and blunders. There has been an alarming increase in recent years in the number of high-profile cases in which unarmed black men and women have been killed by police. These cases have sparked protests and calls for reform of the criminal justice system but the number of civilians killed by police each year remains over 1,000.

Tamir Rice was a 12-year-old black boy who was playing with a toy gun when he was shot and killed by a white police officer in Cleveland, Ohio in 2014. Philando Castile was a black man who was shot and killed by a police officer without provocation during a traffic stop in Falcon Heights, Minnesota in 2016.

George Floyd was a 46-year-old black man who was murdered in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2020, by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer who kneeled on his victim’s neck for almost nine minutes.

Three years after Breonna Taylor was shot and killed in March 2020 as police raided her home, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland released a blistering report Wednesday finding that police violated the constitutional rights of its citizens, particularly Black people, but Myles Cosgrove, the Louisville Metro Police detective whose bullet ultimately killed Taylor according to the Kentucky Attorney General was hired by the Carroll County Sheriff’s Office.